Play it again, Sam

This refers to “Naked” (Weekend Ruminations, September 20). Ninan is absolutely right in identifying the greed of US banks/investment banks/credit raters as the reason for the global financial crisis we’re seeing today. The credit rating agencies did the fraud of classifying dud paper as prime and the banks invested in them despite knowing they were dud paper.

But a few things are not clear. What action has been taken against these perpetrators? The SEC report on the credit rating agencies was released several months ago, but the public, at least, has seen no action. It is not enough to pass strictures, these firms have to be stopped from going ahead and doing more harm and they have to pay for the damage they did. After Enron went belly up, at least one of the audit firms that helped it, also folded up.

Perhaps this will take some time, but we have to ensure that the big banks at the heart of the crisis are not allowed to get away. After all, their crime was no less than that of the late Kenneth Lay who, had he not died, would most certainly have faced years in a prison cell.

What is surprising is that while Finance Minister P Chidambaram has gone on the record assuring investors that India’s financial system is sound and has little exposure to the US system, he has not said a word in appreciation of the RBI. All through the last few years, when the economy was doing so well, so many experts said it was time to make the rupee convertible, to introduce derivatives and futures and all the other alphabet soup letters A V Rajwade has so brilliantly exposed, as these would lower the cost of finance and make India a truly global player. The fact that there is a big financial sector crisis once in a decade has been ignored and its costs never computed. Surely the RBI deserves some credit for this?

Ashok Narula, Mumbai

FDI in Print

The government’s decision to open up the magazine industry to foreign investment is a welcome one, though very late in coming. After newspapers had been opened up so many years ago, it was never clear why magazines were not allowed. It is, however, unfortunate that, both in the case of newspapers and magazines, the top slots all have to be reserved for Indian nationals. Why should the media be different from any other industry? In any case, as various terrorist attacks have shown in the past, there are enough Indian citizens who don’t mind working for foreign interests. If India has to be a truly global citizen, it cannot have these controls which reflect the old control-mindset.

Ajay Singh, Gurgaon